A Zelig for the Internet Age

Just because you arrive at the party late doesn’t mean you can’t help yourself to the hors d’oeuvres or pour yourself a stiff drink.

That’s the way FOTW feels about The Everywhere Girl, a young actress/model who, a couple of years ago, did a photo shoot with a number of other models. For some inexplicable reason, several shots of TEG seem to have caught the zeitgeist fancy and her image began appearing in numerous print ads, on Web sites and in magazine articles. She’s even graces at least one book cover.

The online tech publication The Inquirer tracked nearly three dozen TEG sightings for everything from the Greyhound bus company to Vivarin energy pills (she’s in the uppermost left hand corner of the page). In one memorable 1-2 punch, her image was used simultaneously to sell both Dell and Gateway computers. And while the photo shoot took place on the campus of Reed College in Oregon, she’s been on Web pages for schools ranging from Brown College to the University of Hamburg.

Of course, with fame comes controversy. Her Wikipedia entry is being challenged for failing to meet the online encyclopedia’s “notability criteria guidelines,” several Wikipedians have claimed (erroneously, it appears) that she’s a fraud and one of them discovered her true identity (two of them, apparently) and revealed it on the site. Invariably, TEG recently launched a blog to record her thoughts and give her side of the ongoing story.